The Russellville Democrat., 1887-11-30
TALMAGE'S SERMON.
An Interesting Discourse on "The
 Gospel of Health"
The ReIatioa of Bodily Habits and All ments to the Spiritual Condition of the Individual Words of Warn~
 ing to Young and Old.

Ing to Young and Old.
 The subiect of a recent discourse by Rev, T. Dewitt Talmage at the Brooklyn Tabernacle was "The Gospel of Health" His text was;
 Til dart strike through his ver.-Proyerbs, vii, a.
 He said: There is q fashion in sermonics. A comparatively small part of the Bible is called on for texts. Most of the passages of Scripture, when announced at the opening of sermons, immediately divide themselves into old discussions that we have heard from boyhood, and the effect on us is soporiiic. The auditor guesses at the start just what the preacher will say. There are very important chapters and verses that have never been preached from. Much of my lifetime l am devot- ing to unlocking these gold chests and blasting open these quarries We talk about the heart, and preach about the heart, and sing about the heart, but if you refer to the physical organ that we call the hoart 1t has not half so much to do with spirit ual health or disease, moral ex- altation or spiritual depression, as the organ to the consideration of which Solo mon calls us in the text, when he describes sin progressing
 Til a dart strike through his liver.
 Solomon's anatomical and physiological discoveries were so very great that he was nearly three thousand years ahead of the scientists of his day. He, more than one thousand years before Christ, seemed toknow about the circulation of the blood, which Harvey discovered 1,6l9 years after Christ, for which Solomon, in Ecclesiastes, describing the human body, speaks of the pitcher at the fountain, he evidently means the three canals leading from the heart that re as the blood like pitchers. When he spea Ecclesiastes of the sil- yer cord of life, evidently means the spinal marrow, .Out which in onr days Drs, Mayo, and Carpenter, and Dalton, and Flint, and Brown-Sequard have ex- perimented. And Solomon recorded in the Bible thousands of years before scien- lists discovered 1t, that in his time the spinal cord relaxed in old age, producing the tremors of hand and head "Or the silver cord be loosed.''
 In the text he reveals the fact that he had studied that largest gland of the hu- man system, the liver, not by the electric light of the modern dissecting-rooin, but by the dim light of a comparatively dark age, and yet had seen it's important func. tion in the God built castle of the human body-its selecting and secreting power, it's curious cells, it's elongated, bran ching tubes, divine workmanship in csntral and right and left lobe, and the hepatio artery, through which God conducts the crimson tides. 0hl this vital organ is like the eyeof God, in that it never sleeps. Solomon knew of it and had noticed, either in vivisection or post norton, what awful. attacks sin and dissipation make upon it, until, with the fiat of Almighty God, it bids the body and soul separate, and the one it commands to the grave and the other it sends to judgment. jav elin of retribution, not glancing off or mak ing a slight wound, but piercing it from side to side,
 Till the dart strike through the liver.
 Galen and Hippocrates ascribe to Che liver the most of the worlds moral depres- sion, and the word melancholy means black bile.
 breach to you this morning the gospel
 elth. In taking diagnosis of the dis
 the soul you must also take the
 of the diseases of the body. As
 sae tbis, one whole book of the
 was written by a phy-
 IS a doctor, and he dis
 physical effects, and he
 Jod Samaritan's medica-
 70 wounds by pouring in oil and wine, and recognizes hunger as hin- derance to hearing the Gospel, so that the five thousand were fed; and records the sparse diet of the prodigal away from home, and the extinguished eyesight of the beggar by the wayside, and lets us know of the hemorrhage of the wounds of
 
 mortem resuscitatiop. And any estimate of the spiritual condition that does not include also an estimate of the physical condition is incomplete.
 When the doorkeeper of Congress fell dead from excessive joy because Bur goyne had surrendered at Saratoga, and Philip the Fifth of Spain dropped dead ct the news of his country's defeat in battle, and Cardinal Wolsey expired as @ result of Henry the Eighth's anathema, it was demonstrated that the body and soul are Siamese twins, and when you thrill the one with joy or sorrow you thrill the other. We might as well recognize the tremendous fact that there are two mighty fortresses in the human body, the heart and the liver; the heart the fortress of all graces, the liver the fortress of all the furies. You may have the head filled with all intellectualities, and the ear with all musical appreciation, and the mouth with all eloquence, and tho hand with all industries, and the heart with all gen. erosities, and yet
 A dart strike through the liver.
 Let Christian people avoid the mis- take that they are all wrong with God be- cause they suffer from depression of spirits. Many consecrated man has found his spiritual sky befogged, and his hc pc of Heaven plotted out, and himself plunged chin deep in the Slough of De. spond, and has said: My heart is not right with God, and I think must have made mistake, and instead of being a child of light l am child of darkness. No one can feel as gloomy as l feel and be a Christian" And he has gone tp his min- ister fo- ~N--.sv.t io--, ,as,4,, ne has collected Flaveps books, and read and read and read, and prayed and prayed and prayed, and wept and wept and wept, and groaned and groaned and groaned.
 My brother, your trouble Is not with the heart, it is n gastric disorder or a rebel ion of the liver. You need physician more than you do clergyman. It is not sin that blots ont your hone of Heaven, but bile. 1t not only yellows your eyehali, and furs your tongue, and makes your head ache, but swoops upon your soul in objections and torebodings- The devil Is after you. He hns failed to despoil your character, and ne does the next best thing for him-he rufies your peace of mind. When he says ehat you are not forgiven soul, when he says that you are not right with God. when he says that you will never get to Heaven, he lies. You are just as sure of Heaven as though you were there already. Hut satan, finding that he can not keen you out of the promised land of Canaan. has determined that the spies shall not bring you any of tho Eschol grapes be- forehand, and that you st all have nothing but prickly pear and crab-apple. You are inat ns good nntu rranr iL. M -